I am one of the 17 finalists for this years Winter Pride Art Awards – Beyond the Binary taking place at The St. Barnabas House London. Details of the exhibition can be found here: http://www.artlyst.com/previews/beyond-binaries-winter-pride-art-awards-announce-finalists/. Thank you everyone who turned up at the PV and endured the mad cue! (1300 people!)

Eye won the Visitor’s Choice Award at the NOA’17. I was selected to be exhibit my work ‘Eye’ from a whopping 3600 entrants at the heart of London, Southbank alongside Damien Hirst, Gavin Turk and Sir Peter Blake. Eye is a piece about female oppression, East & West binary and censorship.

A little frame from this years Venice Film Festival. Red Carpet event of the ‘The Cut’ by Fatih Akin. Venice has its own magic about it, when the magic of cinema arrives it feels like the magical realism is present every second. Cant wait for next year…

Under The Skin is a Sci-Fi thriller based on a novel by Michel Faber. The adaptation is fascinating in terms of British director Jonathan Glazer’s rich visual language and how he layers his film with symbols and metaphors around its interesting plot.

“A voluptuous woman of unknown origin combs the highway in search of isolated or forsaken men, luring a succession of lost souls into an otherworldly lair. They are seduced, stripped of their humanity, and never heard from again.”

The film opens with as a small white dot in the middle of total darkness. It is neither explained nor reasoned with by any scientific narrative (unlike many Sci-Fi scripts). I wondered what the link was about until the mid-part of the film. The metaphor may have been the “light at the end of the tunnel”. This “light at the end of the tunnel” visually makes a lot more sense once you enter the nameless female alien’s “black cave of desire”. Now, this “Fatalien” (that’s the name I have given her- a drive from fatale+alien) is a walking talking Siren Call. A (literally!) deadly desire object that drives men (she literally drives them, too) into her life. Men gradually get naked following their desire object and get drowned in a black liquid. After witnessing a couple of these men getting lost in this black liquid, we finally see what is inside. It is created by Glazer as a completely dark place where men hang naked in dense liquid. They are shown in a “primal position”, like embryos in their mother’s womb. The place where this “prey” ends up is a metaphorical womb. A reverse birth. They enter the house fully clothed, get naked, step into the liquid and get finally sucked empty, leaving behind only their skin, having turned into “a piece of meat” – just how we all started. Here, I believe Glazer plays with Sigmund Freud’s popular argument that for men having coitus is like going back to the safe and peaceful place of the “womb”, where they existed before suffering the trauma of “birth’. We were all born with this trauma. Leaving the 36 degree warm and safe womb and entering a colder environment, breathing for the first time. The poignant nature of oxygen in our lungs. The pain in our eyes from light after pitch darkness.We don’t remember these (at least I don’t!), but on an unconscious level our emotion memory remembers this trauma and may register life as shaped by “trauma and pain”. That’s why men pursue to go back to a pre-birth stage through coitus. Hence the “light at the end of the tunnel”.

When the “fatalien” is an emotionless alien preying on men, she appears strong and predator-like.As soon as she starts to develop emotions, however, she becomes vulnerable and weak. The more she is ‘humanized’, the weaker she becomes. And at the end she finds herself subjected to a rape attack by a male. Again an amazing coincidence?! She could only protect herself from this sexual attack by becoming “the alien” again. So what does the director tell us here about women, desire and life?

My path in acting has taken a new turn with Eric Morris’s Acting system. Fortunate enough to be accepted to the Bova actors workshop and learn this psychoanalytic approach to acting. Freeing ourselves as actors is the best creative source. We carry the burden of social taboos, previous cognitive behavioral experiences and self consciousness. My already existing interest in psychoanalysis has helped me to welcome this approach and I am enjoying it deeply. New York itself is a stage and lets see where this journey takes me to. Eric Morris has worked with actors such as Jack Nicholson who is known with his authentic performances!

On 31st of December, the very last day of Maya year:) i took some photos for Urban Nerds. All I can say is how I am amazed by MC Creed’s performance and his aura as performer. You can tell from the photo, he is real charm to the camera

Sheep Skin is a film made by young people with filmmaker Mustafa Boğa and Tuğba Tirpan within the Act Against Crime project.

Act Against Crime is a Balik Arts project funded by Home Office CAGGK Fund and aims to engage young people aged 12-15 in filmmaking. Throughout the project, held in the first quarter of 2012, young people worked with professionals from the film industry and were instructed on various stages of filmmaking, from script writing through casting to shooting and editing. They also had the opportunity to gain experience of a range of technologies and exposure to role models in this vibrant industry. Exploring the current reality of their lives, the participants, largely from Turkish and Kurdish backgrounds, were able to express themselves through the exciting medium of film, which resulted in the production of a short film.

‘I dont photograph what I see with my eyes, I photograph what I see with my mind’ Sacha is one of those photography artists! He uses distopian science fiction stories combined with regular sci-fci iconography (where the world is white and bright the story is dark and gloomy). The only critisism would be that he uses pp work too much but if you do are fed from sci-fci what could u expect? here there are some pics of his amazing work. Enjoy!